Product Description

Who was the real man from Galilee? How can we separate the historical from the literary? Why are there such divergent portraits of Jesus in modern biblical scholarship?

Here is the first comprehensive, balances account of historical Jesus studies. Beginning with brief discussions of the early days of historical research into the person of Jesus and the methods developed by researchers at the time, Mark Allan Powell offers insightful overviews of some of the most important participants in the contemporary Jesus quests: Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, E. P. Sanders, John Meier, and N. T. Wright, among others. Powell concludes by outlining issues and directions for research that will likely guide these quests into the next century.

Publisher's Description

Here is the first comprehensive, balanced account of historical Jesus studies. Beginning with brief discussions of the early days of historical research into the person of Jesus and the methods developed by researchers at the time, Mark Allen Powell offers insightful overviews of some of the most important participants in the contemporary Jesus quests.

Author Bio

Mark Allan Powell is Robert and Phyllis Leatherman Professor of New Testament at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio.

Publisher's Weekly

Anyone intrigued by the history, methodology and results of the research done
in the quest for the historical Jesus should read Powell's study. In his
opening chapter, Powell notes that interest in the historical Jesus began in
the 1700s due to Reimarus's volume that declared Jesus to be a messiah only in
a worldly, political sense. He then explains how later scholars have influenced
the search for the historical Jesus. The heart of the book lies in Powell's
"snapshots" of Jesus, a sampling of the diverse portraits of the historical
Jesus and of the scholars who are engaged in contemporary research, including:
Jesus as social prophet (Richard A. Horsley); Jesus as charismatic Jew (Geza
Vermes); Jesus as magician (Morton Smith); Jesus as Jewish sage (Ben
Witherington III); and Jesus as cynic philosopher (F. Gerald Downing). He then
presents what he regards as the six key players in the current quest for the
historical Jesus--the participants in the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan,
Marcus J. Borg, E.P. Sanders, John P. Meier and N.T. Wright--and offers
critiques of their methods and findings. Powell concludes that the goal of our
search for the historical Jesus should be "the Jesus of a story, a story of
which history is but a part, sometimes a shadow." (Dec.)

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